In academic circles, when poetic legacies, such as that of Michael Hartnett, are thrashed out and explored, there is always, of necessity, a legacy BUT.  BUT… he passed away in mid-sentence; his potential was unfulfilled, etc., etc.  We leave such debates to the continuing academic interest in Hartnett, but for those of us who love Michael Hartnett, the debate has already been won.   His core work, what we see in his numerous collections, his brilliant work as a translator, and his lyrical evocation of a Maiden Street upbringing (‘we were such golden children never to be dust’) and his other mischievous local interventions, are timeless and will stand the test of time – no ifs, ands or buts.

For those of us who are true believers, Michael Hartnett’s legacy as one of the central figures in modern Irish poetry is guaranteed. The Éigse Michael Hartnett festival, held annually throughout the town in schools, the library, the Red Door Gallery, the Desmond Complex, St. Ita’s Hospital, the Longcourt House Hotel, and in the ever-dwindling number of local pubs, celebrates that legacy each year. The festival’s wide-ranging and diverse programme creates an atmosphere of warmth and conviviality, perfect for lively gatherings, easy conversation, and spirited debate.

While his memory still lingers among us, however, the pace of change is relentless.  The Newcastle West he wrote so roguishly about has faded into the past, living on only in memory and in his verse.  Many of the central characters in these sagas, such as Tony Sheehan, Peg Devine, Tony Roche, Jimmy Deere, John Bourke, Billy the Barber, Pat Whelan, Ned O’Dwyer or Ned Lynch, are no longer readily remembered by the young people of the town.  Each year, however, they are recalled, remembered and celebrated in Éigse Michael Hartnett.

The Michael Hartnett Poetry Award is now worth a whopping €8,000, and the list of winners over the past twenty-five years is impressive. Many of those poets have gone on to achieve national prominence.  And, in the intervening years since the unveiling of that statue by fellow poet Paul Durcan on April 16th, 2011, Durcan’s hope that the statue would become a meeting place, a rendezvous, for parents and children, for schoolchildren, friends, and lovers has come to be a reality.

Michael Hartnett deserves all these efforts to keep his legacy alive – and, some would argue, the time has come for a more permanent centre to attract tourists and scholars to the town.  The Éigse organisers welcome recent efforts to establish a permanent Arts and Cultural Centre in Newcastle West.  This town needs to be a centre for the continued study of the poet’s work and a recognised repository for his papers and other materials before they are lost forever. It has been done successfully in Bellaghy and Inniskeen, so why not in Newcastle West?

Hartnett’s eclectic legacy is assured: his poetry in Irish and in English; his translations of modern Irish poets and of Ó’Bruadair, Haicéid and Ó Rathaille; his ‘local’ poems in Newcastle West and Inchicore; his engagement with the thorny issue of Irish nationalism and language at a time in the 70s during great political unrest without introducing any of the usual tribal undertones, will always be respected and applauded.

In recent times, we salute those who ensured that Hartnett’s iconic portrait by artist Edward McGuire was purchased by Limerick City and County Council on behalf of Limerick City Gallery of Art.  Like Hartnett himself, the portrait returns after a lengthy exile and will now forever be available to view locally.  However, in our continuing efforts to further Hartnett’s legacy, we can and must do more.

The decade from 1975 to 1985 in Glendarragh, Templeglantine, was arguably the most productive of his career.  Adharca Broic was published in 1978, followed by An Phurgóid in 1983, Do Nuala: Foighne Crainn in 1984 and his fourth collection in Irish, An Lia Nocht, appeared in 1985.  During this period, he also undertook the translation of Daibhi Ó Brudair’s poems, which were published in 1985.    In parallel to this ‘serious’ output, he was writing and entertaining the locals with ballads, some serious or semi-serious like ‘A Ballad on the State of the Nation’, which was distributed as a one-page pamphlet like the ballads of old and even included original linocuttings by local artist Cliodhna Cussen. Other ballads were more contentious and even semi-libellous (or fully slanderous!), such as ‘The Balad (sic) of Salad Sunday’ and ‘The Duck Lovers Dance’.  These latter creations were written under the very appropriate nom de plume, ‘The Wasp’!

It has to be remembered that at this time, Newcastle West and its West Limerick hinterland were booming.  The Alcan plant in Aughinish Island near Askeaton was under construction and every man, woman and child was working there.  Added to this, every spare room was occupied as up to 4,000 workers from all over Ireland were involved in the construction phase of the project.  The idyll of coming back home to a quiet rural backwater conducive to creativity in West Limerick was shattered by this unexpected and localised economic progress.  Ironically, while Michael was enjoying the  Klondike atmosphere in the hostelries of Newcastle West, his wife Rosemary was working as the Personal Assistant to the Managing Director of the newly commissioned Alcan Aluminium site.

This surely goes to the heart of the tragedy of what was Michael Hartnett’s life as a poet.  The literary and academic world tried in vain to accommodate him, although this help and recognition may have come too late to save him from the clutches of alcoholism.  While the annual Éigse sets out to maintain his rich legacy and celebrate his genius, it does tend to sugar-coat his reputation and often the big elephant in the room is ignored.  This must be a continuing source of frustration to his wife, Rosemary, his children and his surviving family members in and around Newcastle West.

The sad reality for Michael and his family was that he did not avail himself fully of the many opportunities that were offered to him in the 1970s and later. Rosemary bemoans the fact that while his contemporaries, such as Montague, Durcan, Kennelly and Heaney all wrote poetry, they also managed to earn a salary, whereas her husband ‘spurned all opportunities to do anything except write poetry and drink!’

He was the first recipient of a bursary from the Irish American Cultural Institute in 1974, which allowed him and his wife, Rosemary, to put a deposit on a cottage in the townland of Glendarragh, Templeglantine.  In that same year, he was awarded both the Irish American Literature Award and the Arts Council Award.  Following his return to West Limerick, he was employed for a brief time as a lecturer in Creative Writing at Thomond College of Physical Education (now the University of Limerick), but his tenure there was patchy and temporary.

Thus, at age 34, one would presume that Michael was free to pursue his calling as a poet and enjoy the countryside ‘out foreign in ‘Glantine’.  A good fairy, his wife Rosemary, paid the mortgage and all the bills and dealt with bureaucratic matters. She did it willingly because she believed in him and loved him and because she did not want her children to starve. 

Sadly, it seems that his obsession with poetry and drink left very little room for any other relationships to thrive and survive, and this included his marriage to Rosemary.  The acclaimed documentary by Pat Collins, A Necklace of Wrens (1999), ends with a very poignant, philosophical reverie as to whether Hartnett saw poetry as a gift or a curse:

It’s very difficult to describe where poetry comes from.  It certainly was given to me, but so were my brown eyes and my big ears.  They are just part of what I am, to coin a phrase.  I believe it’s a gift, certainly, and I’m lucky to have it.  But also it’s a curse, so I’m in two moods about it really.  I could say I did it all myself, which would be a total lie because there’s an entire three or four thousand years of tradition behind me in many languages.  But whether it was given or not, I can’t answer that question.  It just turned up and I turned up to meet it and we met at the crossroads and got married and we’re still married.

Michael Hartnett had a great predilection for romantic yarns. If they weren’t true, he was amused by the way they were taken up, including by the media and even sometimes by academics. Most of these myths, created by Hartnett to suit his own nefarious purposes, are trotted out again and again. One example of what passes for analysis:

At the age of three, Hartnett was sent to live with his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, who lived in Camas, a townland in the parish of Templeglantine, west of Newcastle West.  He was educated in the local primary school, and then in the well-known and enlightened St. Ita’s secondary school in Tarbert, Co. Kerry, run by the redoubtable Jane Agnes McKenna, a school that would later boast both Gabriel Fitzmaurice and Brendan Kennelly as alumni (McDonagh, Newman 15).

Hartnett, himself a master of misinformation and disinformation, would have been very impressed with the inventive mythmaking in this piece.  For the record, Brigid Halpin’s cottage in Camas is situated about a mile from the village of Raheenagh in the parish of Kileedy.  While it is true that he spent some time with his grandmother before beginning school and frequently thereafter for short stays at weekends and during school holidays, he attended Primary School in Newcastle West, first in Scoil Iosef and later in the long-established Courtenay Boys’ School. He then attended the very well-known and enlightened St. Ita’s Secondary School in Newcastle West, which was run by Jim Breen and where his English teacher was Billy O’Donnell.

Many of the myths surrounding Hartnett relate to Brigid Halpin, his grandmother. The reality is that she was not a native Irish speaker; he was not ‘fostered out’ to her for long periods in his childhood, and he did not learn Irish in her lowly cottage in Camas. Neither was she born in 1870, as he suggests in the famous Pat Collins documentary.  We know from Census records that she was a mere 80 years of age when she died alone in St. Ita’s Hospital, Newcastle West, in 1965. These inaccuracies continue to appear in much of what passes for scholarly research and analysis since he passed away in 1999, and, as I pointed out earlier, some of the biggest culprits are local. 

Despite this, Hartnett’s legacy is assured but demands continued and vigorous investigation.  While Declan Kiberd lavishes praise on Hartnett for being ‘the greatest translator of Irish-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century’, he also bemoans the fact that ‘he is also his country’s most underrated poet (Kiberd, 381).  From the lofty heights where Heaney declares that Hartnett is the ‘authentic heir to the poets of the Maigue’ to those in the many hostelries he visited who dismissed him as an annoyance, there is the growing realisation of the truth in his son Niall’s observation that, ‘My father was many men to many people’ (McDonagh and Newman, 7).  Seamus Heaney remembers the frisson of electric energy which followed a Hartnett book launch – he says it was akin to a ‘power surge’ in the national grid.  He continues:

Yet despite that, his achievement was under-noticed.  Slight of build and disinclined to flaunt himself on the literary scene, he was always more focused on his creative journey than on career moves.  Edward McGuire’s portrait catches this singular intensity, but the response to his writings has been less definitive.’

Hartnett’s son, Niall, in an article in the Sunday Independent, on September 30th, 2024, spells out the current reality:

“His legacy as a poet is hard to gauge. His legacy is still spreading in Ireland, especially through the school system, although slowing in my opinion. But progress internationally is at a snail’s pace, sadly. My hope is that the school-goers of today in Ireland will be the next to carry his torch in the future to a wider audience.” 

And as we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hartnett’s passing, we can see that time moves on and new poets emerge and are celebrated each year at Éigse  Michael Hartnett in Newcastle West, and in Listowel and Dromineer and many other far-flung Literary Festivals whose aim is to foster and nurture and give a platform to the young, vibrant successors of Hartnett. 

Twenty-five years on, the judgement of John McDonagh and Stephen Newman made shortly after his passing still holds true:

His body of work is a testament to his lifelong struggle with complacency and a desire to write with honesty and integrity that marks him out as one of the most overlooked yet influential Irish poets of the twentieth century (McDonagh, Newman, 24).

Prophets are never recognised in their own countries.  Until, that is, they make themselves irremovable landmarks on our landscapes and streetscapes.  The once-banished artist returns as a statue in our most cherished Square, an Éigse Literary and Arts Festival to honour him in perpetuity.  Hartnett deserves all these accolades.  He was at times painfully honest, very acerbic at other times, but always truthful until it hurt.  Emerson had him in mind when, in his famous definition of friendship, he states, ‘Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo’, and he concludes with the admonition: ‘Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untameable and devoutly revered’.

References:

Collins, Pat.  Film documentary A Necklace of Wrens (1999).

Hartnett, Rosemary, in correspondence with the author.

Kiberd, Declan. The Double Vision of Michael Hartnett in After Ireland: Writing the nation from Beckett to the present, Head of Zeus UK, 2017.

McDonagh, J., Newman, S.  (eds). Remembering Michael Hartnett, Four Courts Press Ltd., Dublin, 2006.